By turning most of health care into what amounts to regulated utilities, Obamacare forced mergers and acquisitions within the sector.

A recent Wall Street Journal story highlighting a new antitrust investigation against the nation’s largest health insurer represents a variation on a long-standing theme. In this instance, as in prior occurrences, the Justice Department and federal officials are trying to undo the harmful effects of a law — Obamacare — that has led industry giants throughout the health sector to consolidate.

Recall that, four election cycles ago, then-candidate Obama promised in 2008 that his health care plan would lower premiums by an average of $2,500 per family. That premiums continue to rise unabated shows the failure of Obamacare by Obama’s own standards — and the anti-competitive behavior the law has engendered explains why. //

But Warren gave away the plot by citing the title of a blog post in her letter: “How Obamacare Created Big Medicine.” It’s the perfect summation of why, as Donald Trump said in social media posts around the time of Warren’s letter, “Obamacare sucks.” And the Justice Department’s investigation into UnitedHealth provides an implicit admission that even President Biden and his administration agree.

A presidential candidate is finally talking about exercise in the context of reforming the broken American “health” care system.

At the Republican debate in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy called on the health insurance industry to prioritize preventative medicine over high-dollar procedures that are only sought after disease has already taken hold.

“They’ll pay for anything like feeding tubes, doctors to be pill pushers,” Ramaswamy said, but not for “the procedures that can actually make these patients better.”

“Here’s the answer,” Ramaswamy added. “We need to start having diverse insurance options in a competitive marketplace that cover actual health, preventative medicine, diet, exercise, lifestyle, and otherwise.”

“We don’t have a health care system in this country. We have a sick care system,” Ramaswamy explained. //

Dr. Peter Attia wrote about the broken nature of our current health care system in his book, Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity, in March.

Health insurance companies won’t pay a doctor very much to tell a patient to change the way he eats, or to monitor the blood glucose levels in order to prevent him from developing type 2 diabetes. Yet insurance will pay for this same patient’s (very expensive) insulin after he has been diagnosed. Similarly, there’s no billing code for putting a patient on a comprehensive exercise program designed to maintain her muscle mass and sense of balance while building her resistance to injury. But if she falls and breaks her hip, then her surgery and physical therapy will be covered.

The U.S. spends roughly $3.6 trillion on health care every year but just 3 percent or less of that spending is targeted at prevention. U.S. health care spending, meanwhile, reached more than 18 percent of GDP in 2021, up from 5 percent in 1960.